Chapter One: Undiscovery (Finished)

01-03

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Tyler Gavins

The lone headlight created a narrow cone of light and cast Tyler’s pale face in even paler illumination. Darkness swallowed the path in his bicycle’s wake like a giant snake retracting its tongue. The sky was still pitch black except for the rare and momentary break of cloud cover that would reveal a small section of star-dense sky.

He didn’t want to go home immediately. Yes, he definitely did not. Tyler flew down the trail, an indecisive path in mind that neither delayed his arrival nor sped it up. He could still change his mind...

The icy wind was penetrative, cutting through his jacket like it was nonexistent. His hands were made numb and aggravated by the handlebars’ vibration of unsteady intensity as well as the cold. The wind chilled his head and pained his ears despite the hood of his jacket. Yet still, in spite of all the unpleasantries, he harbored the apathetic desire to linger. Home could wait, couldn’t it?

The path twisted left and right, downhill and uphill. It dropped down into a slope scarred with rain-craved crevasses and filled with exposed roots. It rose again steeply and he had to stand if he wanted to push forward, worrying his bike wouldn’t find traction on the leaves which obscured the path. The slope shifted downward again and his bike picked up speed.

Tyler was contemplating acting on the desire when the path suddenly split into two—and he hung right when he should have swung left, down a trail he wasn’t aware of. It was an incredibly easy mistake to make with the vagueness of the path, narrow cone of light, and utter darkness. To his credit, he didn’t go sailing into the quarry’s freezing waters. When his headlight failed to illuminate an approaching lip of suspicious darkness, a pit of blackness, his face was painted with shock and he did an ungraceful dive off the side of his bike. It went on to fly into the open air above the quarry, its trajectory curving downward. He barely heard the splash as he rolled ass over face downhill in pure darkness. He hurtled into a tree trunk which killed his momentum very quickly and extremely painfully.

Holy fuck, he thought, lying on his back, breathing heavily, holy fuck.

His whole body, and head in particular, was a dull throb, his left ankle felt numb—he rotated it and pain shot up his leg—and he was pretty sure he tasted blood. He couldn’t figure out where he’d hit the tree until the throbbing in his head faded into a deep-rooted ache and he rolled over in time to throw up while propped hastily on his forearms. He gagged, spat deliberately, then pushed away from his mess and fell against the closest tree which happened to be the one that stopped him. The post-vomit taste in his mouth nearly made him throw up again, but he didn’t. He was notified of pain—of minor scrapes and bruises sustained during the tumble—that he was previously unaware of. His ankle radiated a pleasant heat, which he found somewhat disturbing even in his daze.

The word ‘concussion’ echoed in his head until it had lost all meaning. He blinked, a little confused, whispering several mild curses when his dazed mind finally acknowledged the complete and utter darkness. The only difference he garner could between it and shutting one's eyes was a vague sense of motion in the treetops, though perhaps he was just delirious. Either way, he was definitely concussed.

The shrouded trees crackled again in the wind, bane branches scratching against one another, and Tyler imagined bones would make a similar sound and couldn’t shake that image as he began to lose consciousness. He couldn’t see the moon, as vague and weak as it would have been behind the clouds. The sky was all black now. He drifted off, dreaming of an arctic tundra more befitting of the cold he felt.

And it was the sheer magnitude of the warmth which woke Tyler. He open his eyes and stared groggily up into twin flashlights that glowed a green of great depths far above him. He blinked. The flashlights tilted inquisitively to one side in unison, leaving a fading trail of light on Tyler’s retinas. He blinked several more times, the harsh glow softened, becoming more ovalular, and he discerned slitted pupils. A surprised squawk escaped his throat before he hissed numerous curses and backed up against the tree.

Something monstrously large stood in the darkness. Its glowing eyes of green light cast a dim illumination halfway down the length of its own black-furred snout, home to nostrils which issued hot air after every ebb of breath.

It seemed amused as it leaned toward him, the eyes of rich green traced on his eyes. He could smell its coppery breath. It smelt grossly of blood. Tyler went off on another tirade of curses that would have made a sailor wince, muttered something vulgar about Clifford the Big Red Dog, and anti-climaxed with the phrase “You got be shiting me.”

Tyler fainted, but the creature had already drawn back, vaguely cackling in the wind with a demented laugh, or perhaps it was the trees again.

---

Tyler opened his eyes without having fully woken. He stared into an abstract painting of darkness and blurry colors which were tinted with an orange light. He was lying on his side on a flat and hard surface. The exposed skin of his face and hands told him it was cold.

Awareness came slowly, like his liquefied conscious was being poured haphazardly into a glass far too small to contain it all. It splashed and spilled over the edges, making a thorough mess and hindering his ability to think cognitively.

Tyler’s vision came mostly into focus and he realized he was looking at a parking lot. It was still night, still clouded. He recognized belatedly it was the diner’s parking lot. He was curled into a ball outside of the diner’s entrance. He rolled onto his stomach, becoming suddenly conscious of his aching body, and climbed onto his knees. He rested his back against the diner’s glass door—a stray twig poking into his back—and waited for his head to clear completely. His head hurt terribly.

It all came back to him, and the pain of the headache seemed to multiple. He made an odd, stilted noise, attempting to gasp sharply and expel foul language at the same time. It didn’t work. Eventually breathing took priority, and he did so heavily for a solid minute, recalling his encounter with the monster. He remembered how it had watched him for a moment, then descended toward him in the night, green eyes glowing, half a snout glint with its own reflecting light, black-on-black in the night, its true shape and size untold. He was sure—behind the veil of darkness—it was leering.

Yet he was back at the diner and couldn’t pinpoint any new injuries. He pulled his legs to his chest to fight off the cold and stared forward. Jeez, he remembered its breath—hot and coppery. Bloody, too, definitely. And it was huge, radiating warmth like a space heater. What the hell was it?

It hadn’t kill him. That seemed obvious. In fact, it seemed to have brought him back to the diner. What was it and why did it spare him? But why would an animal, even an intelligent animal, have done that? Was it trained? Was it even an animal?

Both this and the concussion were hurting his head. He removed the bothersome twig and his hand came back a little bloody. His eyes widened. Had it bitten him? Oh, hell, no-- He jerked his head around, tugged at his jacket, and stared at the stretched-out holes poked into his jacket that one could stick a few fingers though, and a lot blood. Miraculously, he hadn’t been scratched. He had to get this straight: it had picked him up by the nape of his jacket with its murder muzzle without harming him then deposited him at the diner. All after scaring him half to death for its own amusement.

His back was caked with blood. He felt his stomach churn suddenly.

What the hell was this thing and why was it so goddamn courteous? Was it Clifford the Big, Black and Bloody Dog? Jasper the friendly werewolf? That was ridiculous. He shut his eyes—tired and concussed and confused—and he remembered its eyes so vividly that he thought, for a moment in the blackness, it was staring back at him again. His eyes shot open a split-second later and he shuddered horribly. Was it anymore ridiculous than what had already happened?

He’d lost his backpack during the tumble, he realized, but wasn’t too concerned about the loss of homework and textbooks at the moment. His cellphone was a different story. It was uncomfortable to ride his bike with it in his pocket, so he’d tossed it in there. He could look for it in the daylight hours. But not at night. Definitely not at night.

His rate of breath had mostly normalized when he glanced at his wristwatch: 01:12 AM. He tried not panic again. He had lost more than one and a half hours being unconscious and semiconscious. Was no one looking for him? Had his father not notified anyone that he hadn’t returned home? He stood with minor difficulty, became dazed by a flash of vertigo which faded but didn’t fully pass, and shook his stiff legs and arms despite the deep aching. It hurt to put weight on his sprained ankle, but it wasn’t unbearable. He was stretching, touching his toes when he heard an engine and the crunch of leaves. He jolted upright, which amplified the pain in his head, and listened.

The woods!

He limped briskly to corner of the building, rested on it, and watched a vehicle’s brights light up trees at a diagonal angle as it climbed the steep slope. Tyler was briefly blinded when it mounted the concrete lip of the parking lot and its headlights leveled on him. He shut his eyes and waved madly. The lights shut off quickly. He blinked blindly at where it had stopped and heard a rolling door slam violently open.

It was Samantha, and she was sprinting toward him. Her expression was distraught with an indiscernible layer of either anger or relief. He wasn’t sure if he was going to get slapped or hugged. With his bruises, he wasn’t sure which would hurt worse. She embraced him in a hug, and it was painful, but also comforting.

Tyler remembered the blood half a second too late. When she pulled away with a start, he exclaimed, “Don’t panic!”

Sam let out a muffled gasp when she saw the red on hands and her hoodie, which had been a deep blue and was now mingled with dark splotches of blood around the sleeves. She grabbed him by firmly the shoulders, manhandling him, and spun him around so she could inspect his back. Blood had soaked through to his black t-shirt, but it hadn’t even been pricked. She drew several shaky breaths and Tyler turned around again to face her.

“Are those fucking bite marks on your jacket?” she asked, bewildered. “They’re fucking huge!”

He rubbed one of the shoulders she had manhandled. “Look, a weird thing happened.” He gave her the condensed version as the driver was climbing out of the van.

Sam stared at him. Finally, she said, “Holy shit, that’s rad.”

“In a terrified, shitting yourself sort of way, yeah” he agreed reluctantly. “The blood’s unsettling--”

Bernie stopped several feet away from him and crossed his arms, looking him up and down with disapproval and worry. He stood a foot and a half taller than Tyler. “I just got off the phone with your father. He’s gonna meet you at your home.” So his father hadn’t forgotten about him. What else had he expected? Bernie’s expression and tone became the sternest Tyler had ever seen or heard it. It was actually scary. “What the hell happened to you? Are you alright?”

Tyler opened his mouth to speak, then closed it hesitantly. Sam crossed her arms, too, and seemed to give him an even sterner frown. He realized she wasn’t angry; she was waiting to see what he would do, how much he would tell Bernie. Bernie would either think he was crazy or delusional. Tyler swallowed, his throat terribly dry all of a sudden, and told him everything, with details he hadn’t mentioned to Sam. It wasn’t a long story and he had finished telling it in less than four minutes, but the dizziness had set in again and he had to take a seat on the cement, even for such a short duration.

By the end of it, Bernie had gone from looking a tad angry to concerned to baffled. He looked at Tyler’s back as well and came to the same verdict: whatever might have bitten his jacket had only bitten that, thoroughly soaking it with blood in the process.

“Do you believe me?” Tyler finally asked after a moment of silence following his tale’s conclusion.

Bernie sighed tiredly, massaging the bridge of his nose and waving an apology with the other. “I’m sorry, Tyler. It’s a lot to digest. But whatever happened, you’re hurt. I think we should take you to the emergency center. I’ll call your father, get him to meet us there. And… we can notify the Sheriff’s Office about this animal.”

Tyler nodded, unsure. He exchanged his ruined jacket and bloodied t-shirt—which Bernie threw into a trash bag to give to the Sheriff’s Office; reluctantly, Sam’s hoodie had been added to the mix—for a thick blanket that he wrapped around himself. He climbed into the backseat of the van with Samantha. The shock had mostly wore off, through the headache hadn’t, and sleepiness was soon setting in, but it wasn’t overpowering.

While they settled in, Bernie gave Tyler’s father a call, then asked Tyler if he wanted to speak to him. He excused himself by saying he wanted to speak to his father in person. Bernie told Tyler’s father that he was alright but to meet them at the emergency center, then they were on the highway and on their way to Silicon General Hospital.

The blanket was on the verge of being sweltering, but it was far better than lying out in the cold. Tyler leaned toward Sam, asking in a whisper, “You don’t think I’m faking, do you?”

She looked at him, her expression crossed, like he had accused her of something offensive. “I believe every word you told me.” She eyed a large bump on his head, easily visible on his shaved head, and sighed. “Honestly, if it wasn’t for the state of your jacket, I might have my doubts.”

“I’m sorry about your hoodie,” he whispered guilty, the blanket enveloping him as he sunk deeper into its folds.

“Don’t worry about it,” she replied, then frowned. “You think it killed a deer?”

“I hope it was a deer,” he muttered. He noticed the beginnings of a disturbed look on Sam’s face and corrected himself, feeling bad for implying something so morbid. “Thing is, it didn’t just not eat me, it carried me back to the diner. I’m gonna take a wild guess and say humans aren’t on its menu. Jeez, I wonder what it was.”

“What else could it have been?” Sam asked.

Tyler shrugged, smiled glumly. “Clifford the Big Red Dog?” That comparison had crossed him when he’d encountered it. He found it kind of funny in retrospect.

His smile was contagious and she chuckled weakly. “Let’s hope so.” Her expression became sober and she rubbed her arms. Relinquishing her hoodie, she was down to a t-shirt. “God, this is sort of scary.”

He nodded, but his smile didn’t cease—however, it did diminish a degree. “Not so rad, huh?”

“I don’t know, Ty.” She frowned and her brow creased. “This place is usually boring. I guess I got a little a excited. I didn’t mean to upset you.”

“Nah, it’s pretty rad.” He yawned, closing his eyes, and remembered what he originally mistook for flashlights. He shivered despite the blanket, a wave of dizziness passing over him, a new wave of head pain. “Pretty rad,” he repeated, softer this time and with less conviction. It was off the walls rad, alright. Insane, really.

He leaned closer, whispering even softer to be absolutely sure their driver couldn’t hear them. “Does Bernie believe me?”

Sam glanced upfront. It wasn’t a secret that Tyler thought of Bernie as an older brother. His opinion and support mattered a lot to Tyler. “He’s a little reluctant, but he believes you.” She sighed. “Tomorrow, there’ll be nothing to question. We’ll go out and look for your backpack, maybe even see about getting your bike out of the quarry. Something that big has got to have left tracks. We’ll can take pictures and people will know you’re telling the truth.”

Tyler nodded, but felt it wouldn’t be that simple.

They arrived at the hospital at 01:20 and pulled into the emergency center parking lot half a minute later. Tyler followed Sam out of the van and his eyes immediately found the only other vehicle there: a faded blue Ford parked in the shadows of a tree. His father’s truck. Tyler slid his attention to Bernie, who was debating whether to bring the trash bag with him. In the end, they left without it.

The sliding doors—glowing like a beacon in the dark night—parted as they approached. Like every hospital, the smell of disinfectant permeated the building. White walls, ceiling and floor. They walked down the center of the hallway toward the lobby, their disorderly footsteps signaling their coming. Tyler felt uncomfortable with only the blanket to cover his chest and back.

Daniel Gavins had been standing when they got there. His loose-fitting, red jacket and navy blue trousers concealed his muscular physique, but not his height, which closely rivaled Bernie’s. Daniel gave his son a lingering look of inquiry, a small frown tipping the scale of a expression of indifference, a short black decorating his prematurely wrinkled face.

They met at the point that the hallway widened into the lobby.

“Where were you?” Daniel asked. His voice was low, soft spoken, and just a tad gravelly. People often said it was pleasant; it was like sandpaper to Tyler. Now it was dripping with equal parts impatience and concern.

Tyler didn’t say anything, casting his eyes to the white tile floor for a moment. He surmised accurately that he appeared ashamed. In truth, he felt a spark of frustration which he had to snuff out. ‘Where were you?’ Not, ‘are you okay?’ “The quarry,” he answered vaguely.

His father sighed. “Please don’t be difficult, Ty,” Daniel said. His brown-eyed gaze was hard but not hollow; it was imploring and lit genuine worry. “What happened at the quarry?”

“I was speeding down the wrong trail in night, toward the quarry, and I ditched the bike to avoid the plunge,” Tyler answered more decisively. “From there, I tumbled for a bit, then hit a tree and passed out.”

“Is that all?” Daniel asked.

“No,” Tyler whispered. He dropped the pretense that all was well and the argumentative attitude, glancing nervously at Samantha, then Bernie. “Dad,” he said with difficulty, “I saw… no, I woke up and came face-to-face with some kind of animal. It carried me back to the diner after I passed out a second time, then it left.”

His father raised an eyebrow, then eyed his son’s battered head. “Did it hurt you?” he questioned. When Tyler shook his head, he asked, “How badly did you hit your head?”

“I know what I saw,” Tyler whispered defensively, feeling an echo of head pain in that moment.

“I haven’t voiced any doubts, Tyler,” Daniel countered. “Ty...” he touched his son’s arm and there was an invisible but fully palpable flinch that only he and his son were aware of. He retracted his hand, then crossed his arms. “You’ve gotta admit it sounds far fetched. It carried you back to the diner, did it? That sounds like a Disney movie.”

“I believe Tyler,” Samantha spoke up. She looked at her brother for support.

Bernie frowned then nodded regretfully. “His jacket makes a compelling case.”

Daniel’s brow narrowed into a scowl, the flesh of his scarred and blinded left eye responding less, making it peer out by comparison. “Right now, my son’s health is my concern. Tyler, we’ll discuss what you saw after they’ve gotten a look at you.”

Tyler had begun to sway from standing for so long, the dizziness settling in for the long haul. His father wrapped an arm around his shoulder and Tyler didn’t resist or flinch. Daniel led him to one of the chairs that populated the lobby then went to converse with the perplexed receptionist. Samantha sat next to Tyler and took his hand to comfort him. His undilating eyes were glued to the floor. Bernie remained standing, arms folded across his chest.

In a moment, his father crossed the lobby and sat next to his son, opposite Sam. In the brief window between then and when a nurse would led Tyler away, Daniel asked his son what he’d seen and listened attentively. Daniel’s expression grew troubled, his son was led away. Daniel then excused Bernie and Samantha and they left reluctantly. Bernie passed the trash bag onto Daniel before leaving. He had a look inside the bag before putting in his truck and his worry grew.

Following an examination, Tyler’s concussion was diagnosed as mild, several of his bruises were determined deep but not worrying, and he had no broken bones or lacerations to speak of. Tyler was driven home by his father with a prescription for painkillers which they would pick up at pharmacy in the morning during open hours. His father’s face was no less trouble and they didn’t speak on the way home.

---

The backroad that led to their property cut through the wood woods. In light of recent events, their journey down it was nerve racking for Tyler. The creature would be lurking in the shadows, stalking him and pouncing as he was leaving the truck, ripping him to bloody ribbons with as much exertion as a cat slaughtering a mouse. Yet it didn’t attack. If it was there, it only observed Tyler walk hurriedly from the truck while his father followed at a slower pace. They entered the cabin without incident.

Daniel briefly set the trash bag on the hardwood floor, and called after Tyler as he was passing the threshold to his room. “I believe you, Tyler,” he told him, sadness wavering like a flame in his eyes. “I’ll always believe anything you tell me.”

Tyler hung his head low and drew a rocky breath. “Okay.”

“Take a shower, Ty, and put on a fresh set of clothes,” his father commanded. “If there’s a problem, don’t hesitate to call your sister’s place.”

“You’re going out,” Tyler stated flatly.

His father nodded. “I’ll be back before you’re done showering. Don’t worry.”

He picked up the trash bag and passed by Tyler, putting hand on his shoulder for a moment. Tyler didn’t wince. Daniel continued into the storeroom located at the back of the house. He watched his father deposit the trash bag into one of the fridges his father usually stored venison. He went in his room to grab clothes then exited to the hallway again, pausing as the front door fell shut. He shook his head as he entered the bathroom and closed the door.

Tyler tossed the Joneses’ borrowed blanket by the hamper and looked at his battered reflection in the mirror. He ran a hand over his head’s prickly hairs, poked the large bump cautiously, testing the pain it inflicted, and stopped when it hurt with legitimate intensity. He then turned his back to the mirror, eying the giant, dark patch of dried blood with disgust from over his shoulder. The air’s chill made him shiver.

He climbed out of his jeans and underwear in a hurry, clambered into the shower, and got the water just below roasting. The room quickly filled with steam. He scrubbed at his back with a bar of soap and diluted red water drained for a time, then, seemingly, it was just clear water. From there, he washed from head to toe, careful around his head, extra rigorous around his back just for good measure.

Tyler shut off the water, pulled back the shower curtain, and dried his head then upper torso and arms. He wrapped the towel around his waist, swiped a hand across the foggy mirror to create a window of reflection, and, to be positive it was gone, once again turned his back to the mirror. His eyes widened.

Upon each shoulder blade was a dark red mark. They were spaced like eyes and looked like twin clumps of blood with two thin flames rising from each of them. They were colored exactly like the dried blood that had coated his back. He touched one and he felt nothing but his own skin, as if the markings had been tattooed or dyed on.

It did this to me, shit, shit, shit!

With a fright, he discarded his towel and restored the shower’s hot casade. He scrubbed hard, scrubbed with cold water, scrubbed with various shampoos and body washes until he had exhausted his options, scrubbed until his flesh was raw. He at last tried scratching at it with his fingernails, only managing to hurt himself. He gave up, drying off again and dressing up to his waist. He leaned over the counter, prodded his tender flesh. Uneven, pained blotches had risen around and under both markings as result of his vicious scrubbing, but they remained completely unchanged, unfaded. Dark red on bright red. Only the flesh they rested on had suffered.

Tyler heard the front door open and close and he suddenly felt very dizzy. Heavy bootsteps sounded. Daniel called his name. Tyler shook silently, feet glued to the floor.

“Ty?” his father called again. He knocked on the bathroom door three times. A moment of quiet contemplation passed, then his father knocked three more times in faster succession. “Tyler, are you alright?”

Every fiber of Tyler’s being screamed for him to keep it hidden. He had been marked by the goddamned beast. Clifford had left him a souvenir, generous and courteous as he was. Tyler began to pull on his t-shirt without conscious thought, then paused hesitantly in the process. His father knocked rapidly—eight times in the span of three seconds—and called his name again. His father would break down the door at any moment.

“I-I’m fine!” Tyler shouted back unconvincingly.

Daniel stopped knocking, a tense hand audibly coming to rest on the door. “Why the hell didn’t you answer, boy?”

“I’m... okay,” he repeated with even less conviction. He felt like he was going to be sick. His head droned. His back stung from the damaged he himself had caused.

“Tyler, let me in,” Daniel ordered. He pounded once more on the door. “You’re worrying me, Tyler.”

Tyler could easily and vividly imagine doorframe exploding toward him with the sound of splintering wood as his father rammed his shoulder into the door. The cabin had been built by his father’s uncle and guardian—Tyler’s granduncle—Michael, a man his father spoke highly of, a man his late brother was named after, and a man Tyler had never known. Uncle Mike, as his father knew him, had built the cabin more than about five years before Daniel Gavins had been born. In its fifty-years-plus life span, and Tyler’s own seventeen-years, the bathroom door had not been replaced. Daniel Gavins would ram through it on his second strike at the very most.

Five seconds of silence had lapsed during his imagining and recollection. His father’s closed fist once again struck the door and this time there was a soft but audible crack. Would he hide it? His mind screamed that it was the only option.

---

Two halves of Tyler fought for a moment. The one that commanded logic said that the door would not hold either way, and letting his father in would cull further unpleasantries. And the other one didn’t listen to reason: it was a child’s voice, operating on the shortsighted logic of a child, who whispered frightfully that he should burrow deeper into the alcove… despite the fact he’d be trapped, and still well within reach...

Tyler fought tears as his grip on the countertop tightened. He shouted, with a voice on the verge of cracking, “I’m coming out!”

His father grew silent and waited, but Tyler could hear his father’s heavy boots shifting restlessly through the thin door. Tyler pulled the t-shirt all the way off and left it on the counter as he approached the door. He took a breath, turned the lock, and let the door fall inwards.

His father wasted no time with words. He grabbed both of Tyler’s wrists with a vise grip and surveyed the pale undersides, checking for marks and not finding any additional bruises or so much as a scar, and looked at Tyler’s downturned gaze with something that might have been relief.

Daniel placed a frigid hand on Tyler’s jaw and brought his head up, aligning their eyes. His father’s hard stare was all the inquiry that was needed.

“It’s my back,” Tyler whispered, the fight having left him, but his heart still raced. A complicated fear had replaced it, a fear of eyes and of being watched and of being seen through. The glowing green lanterns possessed by Clifford; his father’s hollow, one eyed stare; and the blood red, eye-like markings on his shoulder blades. Each gaze made Tyler feel horribly vulnerable and scared. “I didn’t want to show you what’s on my back,” he added, but his father had already turned him around.

Tyler cringed when his father’s cold hand touched the raw area in and around the markings, but he said nothing and neither did his father for the longest time. His father withdrew, crossing his arms and giving Tyler an uncomfortable stare.

“I’m sorry for nearly breaking down the door.” Then, Daniel asked, “Do they hurt?”

“Yes,” Tyler answered softly, “but only because I rubbed the skin raw.”

Daniel nodded. He picked up Tyler’s t-shirt and handed it to him. “Get some rest, Ty. You’ll tell me if there’s a change in any shape or form.”

Any shape or form echoed in his mind, conjuring everything from lions and tigers and bears to werewolves and zombies and vampires in a kind of blind fear of the unknown, a doubting of everything known that contradicted such creatures of the night, that he hadn’t experienced his early childhood.

“So it’s a secret then?” Tyler managed.

“You won’t show it to anyone. Not your friends. Not even Mitch when we see him tomorrow.” It was an order.

Daniel went back to the entryway and returned to Tyler with his backpack. He presented it to Tyler, who now lingered in his bedroom doorway. Tyler took it hesitantly and dropped inside his room. Then, looking at his father with mild trepidation, he prepared to ask Do you know what Clifford is? but paused and reformulated the question. He asked, with a tone far more accusing than he’d intended, “What do you know about it?”

“You think I’m... in on some kind of conspiracy?”

Tyler shrugged. He wished, silently, that his heart would stop pulsing in his throat.

“I believe you, Ty, because your my son and because of everything points in the favor of you telling the truth. You know more than me.” His father sighed. “It seemed like it might rain, so I went ahead and checked out the quarry as soon as possible. I found your backpack… and found you’d crashed your bike into the deepest part of the quarry. Sorry to say it’s gone.“ He shifted nervously, and there was a hint of disturbance in his gesture as he pointed toward a camera bag sitting by the door. “There were tracks. Big tracks made by something fuckin’ heavy. And not like any mammal I’ve seen, either. But they’re indisputably real.”

“What do you mean?” The pitch of Tyler’s voice rose slightly, indicative of a sudden spike in anxiety. His heart beat droned in his ears.

“They’ll believe you, Tyler, when they see they photos I took,” Daniel clarified, doing nothing to alleviate Tyler’s anxiety. In fact, his father’s statement only worsened it. “Wherever this thing walked,” Daniel went on, “it’s claws just cut through everything in its path like butter. The claw incisions were the most distinct part of the print. Leaves, twigs, and branches were cut clearly—so clearly they weren’t really disturbed by its own movements. I imagine it can sneak around easily. I found a good print and took a cast of it with quick drying plaster. It’s big, and it’s deep in parts, so I’m not sure what the quality will be. I’ll find out tonight.”

“Tonight?” Tyler reverberated softly, a little surprised. It was at least three in the morning. He studied his father’s expression for a moment, deciding the man wasn’t excited in the traditional sense. Neither did he seem manic. There was a tiredness, maybe even exhaustion, but there was determination more than anything else.

There was a description that fit his father like a glove: Tired but determined. That and tough loving. And below all that… Yes, there was one more. It was confined to the eye. Guilt seemed to glint occasionally. An ever present guilt.

“No one will call you a liar,” his father said with a hard tone, and the characteristics of his expression were mirrored by his tone: tiredness, determination, and a subtle hint of guilt. Guilt that pulled the strings and puppeteered the man.

After they parted and Tyler laid down to rest, he cocooned himself in a blanket and waited for what seemed like hours, his eyes clamped shut, trying not to think. But thoughts came, and they were restless. They drifted from his hollowing encounter with Clifford, to the markings, to his interactions throughout the day, to what his father planned to do with all the evidence, to his sarcastic quips sprinkled here and there which he now cringed at. His thoughts drifted worryingly inward. He waited for sleep to come. He waited.

He waited and he became increasingly impatient.

01-05

---

Clive Carson

Clive was asleep, dreaming a recurring dream that inflicted a sensation that he strangely associated with a penetrative mercury that would coat or seep into his surroundings, over and inside himself. This was also the only way he could describe it—being enveloped by, or perhaps becoming, mercury.

Within his dream, in a world colored entirely by that churning, liquid metal, Clive stood near the edge of an unfathomable chasm that divided the land’s two halves. There were figures—with faces all-too-familiar, yet undefined and unrecognizable—lined on either side of the divide. Later, Clive would try to recall their total present in this iteration of the dream, but it would always fluctuate somewhere between eight and twelve in each attempt at remembrance.

For now, however, he dreamt. The logic of the dream had imposed itself once again—he had to jump the chasm. The odds of succeeding or plummeting were an even fifty-fifty (a fact which the dream insisted he knew) and he took them without question. As he leaped off the edge of the massive split, the other facet of the feeling became apparent—a sort of disregard, but it wasn’t necessarily suicidal. With it, his submersion in that strange sensation was at its peak, or so he believed.

The coin was still in the air as to whether he would cover the gap, but it didn’t matter, because the unexpected happened—one of the faces across the divide became somewhat distinct amidst the churning metal. She was a woman cast in chrome, young and beautiful, blessed with a different kind of beauty, one that he was unfamiliar with.

A name neared the tip of his molten tongue. Then it was gone, he was slowly falling, and the mercury inside his body was drowning him.

Clive woke up holding his breath and gasped.

He remained in bed a while longer that morning, feeling a tad disturbed. Melissa’s side of course was empty, but it was just as well—had she been here, he would have felt more of an obligation to tell her about the new iteration of the dream. The fuzzy sensation lingered at a mere fraction of its strength, then faded entirely.

That woman, he thought, and his skin crawled unpleasantly. Not once did one of the figures ever gain clarity. It was very discomforting. And his acknowledgement within the dream that she was beautiful—even though he felt absolutely no attraction—added a layer of guilt. Dreams are just dreams, he told himself, then got on with his day. But that film of guilt would tint the coming weeks in much the same way that mercury colored the dream.

Clive clambered to his feet, stopped by the restroom and dressed for the morning. Over breakfast, the cover of the The Pyramid caught his attention: Two side-by-side images—one of a house fire in progress, the other of the charred aftermath—were coupled with the caption ‘FEELING THE HEAT—Local authorities pursue arsonist, Interview with Sheriff Mitch Jenkins, page 3’. He turned to the correct page, scanning the piece on last week’s fire. It proffered assurances but not much else; although, Clive noted, Amber Page structured it well enough—now, if only she’d focus on news and stop pestering me about fiction. Returning to page 2, he glanced at the story on last night’s soccer game (‘SILICON SPARROWS DEFEAT DUSKIN DOGS, 14-10’) before thunder rumbled closely and he folded the newspaper back onto the dining room table.

He grabbed the landline. Prior to getting up that morning, the rain had started to fall. As he stepped onto the enclosed patio, it promptly shifted into a slanted downpour that was beating on the windows. He dialed the school, then pressed a hand against one of the tall panes of glass.

“You’ve reached Silicon County High School,” the secretary answered. “How can I help you?”

“Morning, it’s Clive,” he mumbled, peering into the wooded backyard that stretched for miles.

“Mr. Carson,” she said, in a tone he always found too pleasant. “You need to speak to Melissa?”

“Yes. Thank you.” By looking at the aslant tree that was disappearing into the rain’s veil and using it as a point of reference, he gauged he could see, all told, about forty or forty-five feet before the rain obscured his vision. The line clicked.

“Clive?” Melissa spoke, and her voice sent an unexpected chill down his spine.

“Yeah.” He paused noticeably. “Well, listen, it just started pouring real badly, and I thought I’d call. How are things there?”

“Fine for now,” she replied curtly. “And back home?”

“Well, I’ll hold down the fort, but it isn’t looking too pretty. And I...” His voice trailed off.

“Yeah?”

“Just want to say I love you, Missy. Stay safe out there.”

“Back atcha, Cliff. I love you, too.”

A final goodbye was said before severing the connection. Clive took a long breath, looking past the water that fell from the roof and watching the forest sway to the wind. There was that guilt again, tightening in his shoulders like a stripped bolt. Who was that damned woman from the dream? Where had he seen her before?

Against the somewhat valid arguments of his conscience, he closed his eyes and pictured her flowing yet solidified face. The odd sensation returned slightly, and he finally made the connection: she looked a great deal like Melissa, but a lot younger. Maybe there would be more of a resemblance in their wedding picture. He opened his eyes—

And he had almost missed the naked man running between the trees. Barely visible to Clive in the fog of rain, the man was cupping his privates as he now darted behind the aslant tree and hunkered down.

Clive was baffled, and a little humored as well, wishing for an instant he’d brought his coffee with him. He forgot about the dream for the moment as he tried to imagine what circumstances led this man to become buck-naked in the woods. But as the man left the tree and began to approach his yard, Clive sobered up, grasping that there might be a precedent for helping naked men during terrible thunderstorms. Storms could be very dangerous—serious harm could befall the man.

The naked man paused at the treeline—hiding poorly because bare flesh did not blend in with bark at all—then entered the clearing, glancing around in a nervous panic as he walked. He went for the shed—perhaps looking for shelter or something to cover himself with—and Clive got a good look at him. The man was in good shape, he seemed tall against the shed door, and his hair appeared a dark brown in the rain, and—

The hair on Clive’s neck bristled. There were bruises all over the man’s body, or it appeared so through the rain’s distortion. All the way across the yard, he could just be seeing mud. But . . . Jeez, if those are bruises . . . he looks like he got shoved into a sack and kicked something fierce.

It took Clive a second to realize that the man was oblivious to his presence. Likely, the light hit the glass in such a way that the inside of the patio couldn’t be seen. If that was the case, it of course wasn’t fool proof. At any moment, the man could turn and, at a different angle, see right on through to Clive. That would be embarrassing for both of them, Clive realized, if he was just standing there watching.

The idea of turning a blind eye and letting someone rummage through his shed certainly didn’t sit well (assuming even he got open—Clive didn’t remember if he locked it yesterday, and the moment of truth was only seconds away), but he wasn’t entirely sure he wanted to confront a naked man so early in the morning. Of course, this was all highly suspicious. In fact, he wandered if this might be something one should report to the Sheriff’s Office. Maybe . . . maybe not. That seemed a little extreme. Possibly, the man was just the victim of an unfortunate prank. Involving the authorities could cause problems for a mere victim. But then there were the bruises. The man could be in a serious need for help. Either he was going to help the man, or go back inside for his coffee, turning a blind eye and letting the man take whatever it was he needed to be on his way.

01-07

---

Clive Carson

He had a brief conversation with the Sheriff (in which he learned nothing he didn’t already know) before returning home—content, because he would get back long before Melissa. The rain hadn’t subsided in the least. In fact, the storm’s animosity seemed all the more tangible as thunder broke more frequently and distant streaks of lightning lit up the dark clouds like veins pumping molten gold.

Zeus—or some other sky-ruling deity—was having a temper tantrum this morning. Whereas Clive felt rather good and fulfilled, all things considered. He was cold, yes. Damp, certainly. The chance of catching a cold, high. But he felt good about himself in the way only brought about by good deeds. But it was a positivity tempered by the dark doors which still hung open. The fate of the woman troubled Clive especially and he hoped he’d be kept in the loop.

Clive reached Summer Street at about 06:30 and parked in his driveway. Opening the car door and the umbrella immediately afterwards, Clive stepped into the unrelenting shower. Arriving more than a little drenched at the porch, Clive closed the umbrella and fished his keys from his pocket. He inserted the key in the lock, turned, and felt a spell of nausea and lightheadedness. He leaned on the door for a moment then walked unsteadily inside. He felt something else...

Still plagued by lightheadedness, he came to a startling revelation: the walls were the wrong color. Lime green instead of dark gray. Green adorned with white trim. There was a pervasive, intoxicating feeling...

Mercury and disregard, he realized belatedly.

Clive stopped in the entryway of the house, dripping water and shivering, two puddles gathering beneath his tennis shoes. He would have turned tail and run out the door again to learn whose house he had just entered—because wrong house! had been his second thought upon seeing the green walls—but the dark-stained picture frames which populated the wall had caught his attention. He saw a younger version of himself in one of them, smiling widely with a younger version of Melissa and a… a...

There was a little girl, no more than seven-years-old, sitting between them. He, Melissa and the little girl were bunched together and smiling. The little girl’s ashen complexion was peppered with freckles, dark auburn hair was blown across her face in translucent strands, and her eyes were like vast worlds frozen in amber. Looking at the picture made his head ache and his heart hurt, but he couldn’t draw his eyes away from it.

His fingertips brushed the girl’s image, and he felt the wall, but reacted to it all the same. He began to cry involuntarily.

Tears flooded his vision and the lightheadedness seemed to be culminating. He could no longer focus his eyes on the other picture frames—which never seemed to feature more than three blurred outlines, the genders of whom were undecided—and stumbled down the hall. Both items fell out of his hands, the keys clattering with a flat echo, the umbrella flopping with a vague squishing sound.

Clive wandered deeper into the mysterious house that was at once completely foreign and completely familiar. His hindered vision made discerning the differences difficult, but not impossible. It was the same house—with the same shape, dimensions, and hardwood floors—but the walls had been painted a different color, the furniture had been replaced with entirely new sets, then shuffled.

His rate of breath was increasing steadily.

Clive approached the new sofa and dared to reach out to it, to feel if it was real. On his way, his shoulder bumped into something invisible. He hesitated for a moment, then realized something was falling and grabbed at the empty air as that something clanged on the floor without breaking. He nudged the area in front of him with a prodding shoe and it connected to something that was most definitely invisible. He stepped over it.

The house was beginning to rock like a ship, but he knew it was his own dizziness causing the effect. He leaned on the new sofa for stability and his hands disappeared half an inch into the fake sofa and came to rest on the real sofa, his sofa, his invisible sofa.

Someone turned my living room into the goddamn holodeck, he thought, his mind spinning, the room spinning as well. No, even in his confused state, he didn’t think you could project something to be invisible.

Someone drugged me, like how Thomas was drugged, he thought indecisively. Someone drugged my goddamn coffee and now I’m having an incredibly vivid hallucination.

Clive thought foggily of the little girl in the picture and had a sudden, curious idea, in addition to another agonizing wave of his patented feelings of mercury and disregard. The situation was twisted to all hell, but he manage to make since of some of it. The projection, the overlay, was still his house, as strange as it felt for him to consider it as such. It was home to himself and Melissa, and it was also home to a little girl.

He didn’t have any kids. He never attempted to have any kids. He couldn’t… do… it...

Despite that, Clive felt the inherent need to find her. He began to push toward the first floor’s spare bedroom with a crude logic working in his brain: the living room had changed, and perhaps one of the spare bedrooms had been converted to house a new occupant. There were two spares, each on separate floors. He staggered down the hallway, ignoring the stairs because he didn’t think he could make it up there.

He fell against one of the lime green walls for support and pressed forward even as all the feelings and sensations intensified. The walls flashed dark gray and the brief but sudden cutting-off from the things which clouded his senses was like being plunged into icy water. The immediate re-submersion in the feelings was like a sudden transition to a fiery bath. He was going to be sick.

The walls were green, then gray, then green again. He felt he might vomit, but held it down.

He pushed the door open and rested against the doorframe in exasperation. The downstairs guest room was still merely a guest room. There were only a few differences in the furniture’s placement, but besides that, it was largely the same. He didn’t know what he expected. Flowers and the color pink, he supposed. He glanced behind him and the walls in the hallway were still green. The guest room was gray in both states.

But the quest room looked occupied nonetheless. The bed covers were ruffled, there was a large traveling pack sitting on the bed, and a satchel sitting next to that.

A satchel.

The room flashed back to its original state and Clive felt another wave of dizziness. The room blinked between the two states as he climbed into the bed and curled into a ball. Then he was left in the icy cool cut-off, most sensations faded. The feelings of mercury and disregard lingered. Clive fell into a natural sleep, born out of a wholly unnatural exhaustion.

It was not a dreamless sleep.

---

For a while, there was darkness. Then, it was like someone flipped a switch.

The landscape was wooded, the ground was coated darkly, and the sky was a shade lighter than the dark and leafless tree branches. And everything, even the starless sky, was cast in various shades of mercury. The metal surfaces churned, but stayed in form.

Clive took a nervous breath.

Looking at his outstretched arms, he discovered groggily that even his body and clothes were cast in quicksilver. He ran his trembling fingers along the flesh of his forearm and sighed with mild relief when he only felt his skin and arm hair. He touched one of the silver trees, then he rubbed a chalky residue between his fingers.

Clive searched his surroundings for any sign of the chasm, but found no evidence of a crack in the earth. He wandered the woods, looking for the figures from his dream’s previous renditions, but found no one.

It occurred to him how lucid this new rendition was, and he found himself thinking back to the strangeness which had just occurred in his home. He couldn’t make sense of that, so he tried to make sense of this version of the dream. It lacked the chasm, the eight to twelve faceless figures, and the perilous leap. There wasn’t much symbolism to go off of.

“Hello?” he called.

No one answered. Not even an echo. In fact, he thought his voice seemed dampened in some odd way.

“Hello?!” he tried again, louder, noticing the same dampening effect.

And again, there was no answer. Clive exhaled fearfully. He shivered, not from a chill setting in, but from realizing how utterly still the air was. He could hear his own breath, fast and anxious, his pounding heart, but nothing else. The woods were unnatural and foreboding, characteristics emphasized by the vacuum of your typical woodland sounds. No foliage to be ruffled by wind, no wind to do the ruffling, no leaves crunching under your shoes, no birds or squirrels or critters of any kind.

He didn’t want to be here. He didn’t want to be alone, but he wouldn’t feel right pulling someone else into this place. This wholly unnatural place. He took solace in the fact he would wake up soon. But he didn’t feel safe standing around, so he picked a direction and began to wander. And as time passed, he began to fear that he would never wake.

---

Clive woke up foggily. The room was a swirled painter’s palette of the most dull colors in existence. The ceiling was white. There were gray blobs with streaks of white trim. Melancholic lighting peaked through the window blinds to his right. The only color in the room was an auburn smudge to his left, with a ovalular moon with two small green craters.

The features of his wife’s face clarified a moment later. Resting upon the pale canvas of her face were thin red lips which were moving and downturned in an expression of worry, a small nose, and dark green eyes which stared pleadingly. Her auburn hair was messy and frantic.

“Clive,” she repeated imploringly. He heard her this time.

“Hmm?” He had been smiling at her in a sleepy daze. He realized his dumbfounded expression must have scared her, and he suspected he looked short of a few marbles. She shook him again. “I’m awake,” he yawned, frowning. He noticed it had stopped raining. How long was he dreaming?

“Why hell did you climb into the guest bed soaking wet, and with your shoes on?”

He sat up slowly, tossing his legs over the side of the bed. He looked down his shoes, then at the damp Clive-shaped impression he had made on bed. “Oh. I’m sorry.”

“Are you feeling okay?” she asked, touching his forehead with the back of her hand. She frowned, not because he was feverish, but because he wasn’t. “What’s happened to you?”

“I feel fine,” he said. It wasn’t the whole truth, but it also wasn’t a lie. He’d woken up not feeling particularly rested, but neither did he feel bad. ‘Fine’ expressed how he felt. ‘Relieved’ did as well. He was relieved he wasn’t alone anymore. He’d been afraid that he would wander the woods for eternity by himself. But it was a dream. “I really feel fine,” he repeated.

“So you went out,” she stated, sitting next to him and draping an arm around his shoulder and pulling him close. He realized he was shivering a little in his wet clothes. Her warmth comforted him and helped calm the shivering. “You came back and left the front door cracked,” she went on. “You tracked water through the house, dropped your keys and the umbrella on the floor, and knocked the lamp over. Please, tell me what happened, Cliff.”

He felt an obligation to tell her, and not just because she invoked his nickname. This concerned her, too. He’d always had strange dreams, and he if he told her the truth, he would tell her about it, too. It was the vision, or hallucination, which worried him the most. He suspected the little girl was in some way his child. But if he told Melissa his wild speculation—that he had, what, envisioned some kind of alternate dimension in which they had a kid (how ridiculous that sounded)—she be distraught. It would disturb her as much as it disturbed him. And while he could tell a convincing lie, she would certainly see through it, though she might leave it be.

He would tell her everything later, of course, if he could make heads or tails of what he’d seen. There’s too little information to go off of. He’d just upset her.

---

“Okay,” Clive said at last, a trickle of regret in his tone and a feeling of guilt becoming prevalent. He felt shameful that he had seriously considered lying to his wife. So he told her. He told her about that morning’s iteration of the dream, his encounter with Thomas Callahan, and everything Thomas disclosed to him. He recounted their trip to the hospital, his uneventful conversation with the sheriff, and his hallucination and strange new iteration of the recurring dream.

And Melissa waited through all of it with a school teacher’s patience. She didn’t give a single token nod; she only stared watchfully, listening intently, her expression becoming grave as the monologue reached its most sensitive subject matter.

The matter of a little girl with amber eyes.

Following a brief silence at the completion of his monologue, Clive whispered, “I think she’s our daughter.” A moment later, with hesitation and extensive observation of Melissa’s reaction, he added cautiously, “Or what could’ve been.”

“What could’ve been,” Melissa repeated. Her frown deepened.

“What should we do?” Clive asked desperately.

“I don’t know,” she whispered. She repositioned her arm, tightened their embrace, and buried her head into his shoulder as she began to tear up. “I feel bad about this, Cliff. Or something else. Maybe it was some kind of manifestation of your inner regrets, that we grew old without taking the next step in life… that… Christ, I don’t know, Clive.”

He stared at the dark dots spotting her blouse and wondered long he’d been weeping.

They had never had a child, despite extensive considerations, out of fear. Where and when and how the fear had spawned was unknown; it was a placeless fear. But it wasn’t nameless. Clive feared that Melissa would die in childbirth, and she shared in such a foreboding feeling that it was crippling at times. They didn’t practice abstinence, but they had been overly cautious. Now, sex was an irregular occurrence, as both of them had faltered, but their relationship was still healthy without it and they were still very much in love. They’d just decided early on not to have kids.

That was why Clive had a vasectomy two decades ago. That had been a long ago. Now, it was possibly never of them could do their part in producing a child.

“I’m here for you, Clive,” she whispered. “Don’t bottle it up. Tell me if the dreams continue. I’ll listen to you. And the hallucination… it seems dangerous… Please be careful, if it happens again.”

“I will. I love you.

Her laugh was pitiful and more of a croak. “I love you, too.”